Semantics aside, the cross sell functionality should give you the look you currently have on your product page. However, the "View All X Related Products" functionality would need to be customized. It shouldn't be too difficult.

+1 for the "View all X Related products"... that would be great for an accessory page. Currently i have to create a category for all accessories and crate a link in the product description to that cat page. If one could be made dynamically, that would save so much time and effort!

In continuation of the said problem, I would like to display my upsell items on (or instead of) the shopping cart page. However, as I mentioned the default "upsell" functionality works more like a bait and switch, which completely replaces the item the customer added to the cart. Bait and switch is technically another cross sell.



Here is a hypothetical example of what I am trying to do:



The shopper is looking at a the product page of a specific breed of dog. The "cross sell" list shows other breeds of dogs that the shopper may also be interested in. When the shopper adds a breed of dog to the shopping cart (thus making a committment), the shopper will then see a list of items that he could add to the shopping cart along with the dog (upsell). Some examples might be dog food, a book on caring for that specific breed of dog, and dog toys. These items can then also be added to the cart.



For some odd reason, the "upsell" functionality doesn't work this way which forces you to either:

<OL>
<LI>Display the "accessories" (upsells) on the product page (which makes sense if there is room, but it makes more sense to show the shopper what their possible choices are before adding to the cart) and ignore the OOTB "upsell" fucntionality.
* Create a kit for every possible combination of product and accessory and then use the built in "upsell" functionality.
</OL>
Upon analysis of the code, there doesn't seem to be a way to display the upsell items on the shopping cart page regardless of how the options are configured.



The only out of the box solution for upsell seems to be to make a kit for every possible combination of accessories along with the original item and then show the kits in the "bait and switch" list so the shopper doesn't buy a different item than the one they originally "added to cart". This is an extreme amount of work considering how simple the desired task is.



However, before I modify the cart page (which oddly cannot be templated like product, category, and checkout pages), I just wanted to ask if there is a way to add a page that the customer is redirected to when they add an item to the cart, similar to what Amazon.com does that shows the accessories that you can buy along with the item you added? I checked the workflows, but there doesn't seem to be one for "Add to Cart".

Matt,



Thanks for the reply. However, as I mentioned the "up sell" functionality in BVC is actually a bait and switch and the "cross sell" functionality is actually the upsell. Showing the upsell items when adding to the cart worked, but when choosing one of the upsell items to add to the cart, the original item was removed. In addition, there is no way to choose more than one of the upsell items to add to the cart.



What I ended up doing was using the "cross sell" functionality of BVC as my upsell because it had the desired behavior for my upsell. Then I created a copy of the CrossSellDisplay.ascx control and rewired it to pull the data from the upsell table. The only other external thing that was wrong at that point were the labels on the admin page for data entry - so I swapped the labels for "Cross Sell" and "Up Sell".



While this works the way I had hoped, unfortunately it is only skin deep and my cross sell items are being stored in the upsell table and vise versa.



My main issue with the way the "cross sell" functionality works is the fact that it is limited in that you cannot show a different list of products on the product page and on (or before) the shopping cart page. Showing the same list to the customer before and after the item is in the cart doesn't make much sense - the customer didn't choose the item from the product page, so why would they choose the same item from the shopping cart page? Why would I want to show the customer a color sample when they have already committed to buying the product? Why not use the opportunity to show items to the customer that can be purchased along with the product, and use the product page to display items the customer could buy instead of the current product?



One more thing - while the manual population of these 2 lists (which should be 3 lists - cross sell, up sell, and bait and switch) is a nice feature, there should be a way to pull more targeted lists than this the way Amazon.com does. For example, include a list of items that people have purchased most with the current item as well as a tailored list of items chosen based off of the current user's search and navigation history. You would think a product that is in version 5 (and soon to be in version 6) would have this functionality built in already. Then cross-sells and upsells would not need to be populated at the time the store is built.

dotNet guy,

BV does have a Suggested Items control on the product page that shows items that people purchased along with the item you are currently viewing (based on the order history of the site). You won't see anything there until your store has a few sales.

I apologize if this offended you because it wasn't intended. I understand why the feature is there and at no point did I say or imply that this feature is not useful. While working with BVC requires a pretty big learning curve, it is still one of the better software projects I have worked with in my 12 years as a software developer.


However, rather than clouding the issue by turning this into an argument over the marketing terminology, I would like to stress that there is a very critical marketing tool missing from BVC5 - the ability to show a list of related items (which may be items that the customer could buy instead of the current item) on the product page as well as the ability to show a completely different list (although it may be more than 50% the same) when adding the item to the cart. I didn't want to give up the "upsell" functionality in favor of this feature, but I wasn't left with much choice.



I gave a pretty good example of why you would not want the same list before - color samples. You definitely would not want to show them to the customer after they have already committed to adding the product to the cart, but you also definitely want to show the color sample on the product page as a related item. The distinction between these two lists is very significant from a marketing standpoint. The list on the product page is more likely to be used than the main navigation bar of the site since most site traffic follows links in the content of a web site rather than in a navigation bar. Therefore it is important to show alternative items to the current product on the product page.



I have had to find workarouds for other issues with your product, but I make an issue out of this one because I feel it is a fundamental tool that is missing from your toolbox and my other workarounds were issues that the majority of users would not have with BVC5.



Kitting is something I will consider in the future, but I am saving that for later. The fact that I have to build another (matching) custom product page in order to use this feature makes it unappealing at the moment due to my timeline.